wipe drive clean and start over

[shecky981]

OK. now that i have used my new build for a few months now, i am ready to wipe it all clean and reinstall everything the way i want. so, i have some seemingly simple questions (i think i know how ta do this stuff, but, i want to make sure)

1. i want to completely wipe my hard drive (which currently has 3 partitions) and put 2 differently sized partitions on it. I will be dual booting Win 98 SE and Win XP Pro. i will have all my data backed up onto CDR so i have no problem zeroing the drive. what is the best way to do a completely clean install of these 2 OS's and make the partitions? i belive the answer is FDISK or even MaxBlast (that came with my Maxtor HD) correct?

2. i have a few PCI cards, and, i know i will need to reinstall all the drivers for them (a NIC card, a Soundblaster Live! card, a USB card, and a Geforce2 MX400 card) the question is should i yank all of the out (other than the video card) and then reinstall them one by one, or am i OK to leave them in place and the just load the drivers?

3. i have a 2nd hard drive as as slave on IDE 1 that i do NOT want to change in any way. what is the best way to go about this? unplug it while i am redoing the other drive?

[glc]

1. Zeroing it out with Maxblast is the most thorough way to do this. Then use Fdisk and make your Win 98 partition, leave the rest of the drive unpartitioned. Install 98. Then install XP on the unpartitioned space.

2. If they all worked together with no hassles before, just leave them in place.

3. Yes, but be aware of drive letter changes when you hook it back up if it has a primary partition on it.